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Independent pre-election polling indicated wide margin of support for Ahmadinejad

Posted by: ST on June 15, 2009 at 10:33 am

Policy/think tank analysts Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty have written a piece for the WaPo suggesting that the election results from Iran perhaps really do reflect the will of the Iranian people:

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad’s principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The breadth of Ahmadinejad’s support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

[...]

Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply reflected fearful respondents’ reluctance to provide honest answers to pollsters. Yet the integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly four in five Iranians — including most Ahmadinejad supporters — said they wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect Iran’s supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote. Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving the national economy. These were hardly “politically correct” responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.

Indeed, and consistently among all three of our surveys over the past two years, more than 70 percent of Iranians also expressed support for providing full access to weapons inspectors and a guarantee that Iran will not develop or possess nuclear weapons, in return for outside aid and investment. And 77 percent of Iranians favored normal relations and trade with the United States, another result consistent with our previous findings.

Some are disputing those polling numbers. We’ll never know for sure one way or the other, of course, especially considering Iran’s election system is so different from ours. Having said that, the outcome is what it is, and it’s nothing that can be changed, even though the “Supreme Leader” of Iran has ordered an election fraud probe (which we know will be above board, considering he expressed his support for Ahmadinejad well before the election took place).

The WSJ urges the Obama administration to stand with the “change” movement in Iran, but they will have to walk a fine line between encouraging and fostering the attitudes of those desiring for change in Iran, and doing BAU with the Iranian government. It will be interesting to see if Obama’s views towards having a face to face unconditional meeting with Iran’s president has changed in light of the widespread belief that the election results were rigged. He was willing to meet with him even after the threats Ahmeanie made towards Israel – and even knowing that Iran has been aiding, funding, and training ‘insurgents’ in Iraq for years now. Threats against Jews and Americans meant little to Obama in terms of his willingness to meet with Iran’s president, but with so many believing that Iran’s president isn’t the legitimate president of Iran, will his views change? Will he care that he would give legitimacy to Ahmadinejad’s “win” if he met with him face to face – even after the violent suppression of the post-election protesters? He didn’t before, but I guess time will tell.

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8 Responses to “Independent pre-election polling indicated wide margin of support for Ahmadinejad”

Comments

  1. Carol says:
    June 15, 2009 at 11:30 am

    No matter what happens, this is the new Obama era (President of the World). Obamessiah lies and gets away with it. Dictators around the world lie and get away with it. They’re all the same.

    Years ago I traveled the world on humanitarian trips helping children (Uganda, Ecuador, Brazil, Bosnia) and I often said that some day, because of the crooks in Washington and so many ignorant Americans, America would become a third-world country. Maybe my prediction will come true. Hopefully it won’t be in my lifetime. We reap what we sow.

  2. BidEdsBlog says:
    June 15, 2009 at 12:22 pm

    I wrote about this last week. The Supreme Leader of Iran is the one who makes all the rules in Iran. He makes all the decisions in the country or controls all the decisions.
    In order to even be on the ballot you must be approved by a 12 person panel. 6 of that panel are appointed by the Supreme Leader and the other 6 are appointed by a group that is hand picked by the Supreme Leader.
    Read more about it here and stick around for more good stuff-
    LINK

  3. Helen says:
    June 15, 2009 at 5:00 pm

    I see. American pollsters went into Iran and asked people who answered them truthfully, unafraid of who might be listening. Of course. I mean that is just what people do in those countries. I have always thought political scientists were muppets. This is another confirmation.

  4. forest hunter says:
    June 15, 2009 at 5:41 pm

    So…BidEdsBlog, what you’re saying is that apart from a vast regional difference, there’s not a lot of disparity between their system and ours…..and ACORN doesn’t wear a uniform….that we know of….yet.

  5. Sister Toldjah says:
    June 15, 2009 at 5:44 pm

    Helen – the authors addressed that in a part of their article I excerpted.

  6. Carlos says:
    June 15, 2009 at 6:14 pm

    Since the WaPo had a multi-orgasmic leadup to last year’s election here, why should I believe anything I read there without outside, independent third-party confirmation?

    And BidEdsBlog is correct in his assessment of who runs the elections start-to-finish. Only the Supreme Leader has that power (kinda what His Hollowness is reaching for, without the obvious armed militant backing).

  7. Helen says:
    June 15, 2009 at 7:53 pm

    Sorry, ST, they did not address it. They came up with spurious “evidence” that people were telling the truth. We have been here with similar studies about the Soviet Union, China and any other country of that kind. To start with, who was conducting the interviews and in what language? Were there interpreters and who were they? If no interpreters then they must have interviewed people who could speak English well enough. What percentage of the population is that?

    Going on, how much did these researchers know about the country and different sections of it? How much did they know about what is and what is not allowed? For example, it sounds to me quite credible that people would not worry about making some general comment about electing the chief mullah, knowing that it is not the issue but will probably balk at saying the truth about who they are going to vote for. But then I recall being told with a straight face that the Soviet Union was a pluralist society. A different kind of pluralism, of course, but a pluralism nevertheless.

  8. Sister Toldjah says:
    June 15, 2009 at 8:03 pm

    To start with, who was conducting the interviews and in what language? Were there interpreters and who were they? If no interpreters then they must have interviewed people who could speak English well enough. What percentage of the population is that?

    TFT study PDF link:

    Methodology:
    This survey was conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public
    Opinion (“TFT”) and the New America Foundation, with fieldwork by KA Europe
    SPRL. Interviews were conducted by phone from a CATI facility in the region but
    outside Iran, in Farsi. They were conducted among a random national sample of
    1,001 Iranians aged 18 and older from May 11th to 20th, 2009. The exact location
    of the CATI facility is not identified in order to maintain confidentiality for the
    interviewing team. The questionnaire consisted of 31 substantive questions, 17
    demographic questions, and 24 quality control questions.
    During the course of fieldwork, there were 2,364 contact attempts made. Of
    these, 625 resulted in non-contacts, yielding a non-contact rate of 26.4%.
    Another 39 contact attempts resulted in non-eligible respondents because they
    were not Iranian nationals, and 8 respondents were never available for scheduled
    call-backs. Of the 1,731 successful contacts, there were 730 refusals giving the
    study a 57.8% response rate. The last poll conducted by KA/TFT had 54.5%
    response rate. This poll has a +/- 3.1% margin of error at the 95% confidence
    interval.
    TFT and KA use telephone interviewing instead of face-to-face research in Iran
    because of the political and social constraints inside Iran. Face-to-face
    interviewing in Iran can be difficult for interviewers who risk possible
    prosecution and imprisonment. Face-to-face interviewing also poses issues
    related to access to households and respondents due to social considerations.
    Access to female respondents across the Middle East can be challenging.
    These problems can be overcome through the use of CATI research in Iran. Iran
    has an estimated national land-line telephone penetration rate of over 90%,
    which gives it a higher telephone penetration rate than most other countries. The
    high percentage of landline households also reduces potential bias from cell
    phone-only households.
    Interviews were conducted by 21 trained interviewers who are native Farsi
    speakers, and have worked on numerous other surveys into Iran. Interviewers
    were briefed on a number of items including, but not limited to, the objective of
    the program and survey details, selection of respondents, the questionnaire (both
    asking of questions and recording of responses), timing and control issues, and
    usage of the CATI system. Interviews were subjected to numerous quality control
    procedures, including direct supervision of all interviews by a supervisor
    experienced in Iranian surveys.

    See more on pages 25 & 26. Sorry for the rough formatting. I copied straight from the PDF.